Biosphere 2! The million dollar question...

Just got back from visiting the world famous (in certain circles), Biosphere 2.
First of all, they were selling some pretty interesting stuff, like rum flavored maggot worms and these scorpion worms. I asked around about this to my friends and peeps and apparently people actually eat these! Yes, these are real suckers that you can get for a couple bucks... Yum! I took a picture instead.

To start off, this place is purely awesome! The engineering of this place alone is a marvel.

Desert Biome

What you see above ground is only part. I've looked at controlled environment systems before and this one is pretty cool. It was originally designed to be sealed completely off from biosphere 1 (planet earth). They don't keep it sealed anymore, but our hip tour guide mentioned that this building leaked less air than a space shuttle, which is less than 10% or something like that. I thought that the coolest part was the rainforest, but they didn't have this part open to the public that much.
Even though its not a sealed environment, meaning all the conditions are contained and controlled, there are still a lot of experiments going on. In the rainforest there was an ongoing study by some world reknown rainforest scientist. In the African Savannah, there was an experiment going on testing root growth of native arizona plant species, some water bug migration pattern, and then there was a huge area dedicated to water erosion that hadn't been set up as of yet. It was called the LEO project or something like that. The site also had several greenhouses and other little experiments going on around on the outside of the biosphere.

They used to have a live reef with coral and forty varieties of fish which would have been amazing to see, but this broken pond of sea water was overgrown with algae and we saw a fish swimming around every now and then... (I say broken because the wave maker wasn't working when I went) It earned the lame vote. Coolest part was that our tour guide told us that the biosphereians who lived in the dome for almost two years would go swimming and jump off of the cliff into the deep end. Next time, baby...


We learned that it was recently acquired by the University of Arizona and is ranked among the top donations ever. Hopefully they do something good with that ”ocean”. I think the structure of biosphere 2 alone is worth several hundred million or so. Our tour guide may have tossed out a billion, I can't remember at this point.

All in all, a phenomenal structure to see, amazing engineering feat and controlled environment project. A modern forerunner to possible future space living conditions, although the biosphereians who lived there for a year and a half came out starving. I would rank it among the great things of the world, almost like Babylons Hanging Gardens, only this building is out in the middle of nowhere.